'Alibaba' review: An engaging biography

Alibaba reported $3.06 billion in fourth-quarter revenue, well up from $1.84 billion a year earlier.We often think of successful tech CEOs climbing from the nerdy ranks of tinkering programmers, like Bill Gates, but as Alibaba, Duncan Clark's engaging biography explains, Ma's humble origins gave no clue to his future — then again, in 1970s China, the very idea of a homegrown technology business executive was inconceivable. Born in 1964 to a photographer and a factory worker, Ma grew up a mediocre student in the city of Hangzhou. About the only thing that set Ma apart was learning English, which he would practice by speaking to tourists passing through his hometown. One of these tourists, a vacationing Australian communist, became a generous benefactor who even helped buy a house for young Ma and his wife.

After a stint teaching English, Ma began running a tiny translation business, focused on Chinese companies — beginning to flourish under Deng Xiaoping — seeking to do business with the West. During his first visit to the US in the mid-90s, a friend in Seattle logged Ma onto the Internet, and it occurred to him that listing Chinese companies online might be a good idea.

If you think early American web pioneers had a tough time persuading investors and consumers to embrace the scary new world of e-commerce, imagine the challenge Ma's startup faced: most of China had no Internet, so his early clients were handing him thousands of dollars to create web services they themselves could not see. "I was treated like a con man for three years," Ma said.

Soon enough, though, his clients answered their phones to find curious Western customers on the line. In the late '90s, as the Chinese government began a delicate program of encouraging Internet growth without giving up state control, Ma's 'China Pages' and several other Chinese startups began to attract the attention of outside investors. That money, some of which came from the Japanese billionaire Masayoshi Son, was rocket fuel for what became Alibaba, which has a massive shippinglogistics arm on top of its e-commerce services. When Alibaba went public in 2014, the $25 billion it raised made it the largest IPO. in world history (the next two, incidentally, were Chinese statecontrolled enterprises).

Clark is a China-based investment adviser and one-time consultant to Alibaba; he notes that his failure to exercise stock options he was given as payment became a $30-million mistake. The access he got to the company pushes his breezy account more toward the business than to Ma's personality. Still, Ma emerges as an unpretentious, self-deprecating leader, fond of quoting martial arts novels and Forrest Gump. Yet he is also shrewd and driven. The Chinese government's control over the Internet may still make political dissent difficult, but Ma and some others have demonstrated that there are few limits to building world-beating companies.